"I love the improvements - great job!!" BarbaraUSA"Fabulous. More features than I probably will be able to use in a long
while."Brian
KurtzTaylor,
MI"Fantastic! This is a vast improvement over the original
version." Brenda
HarnessUS"Blown away by the incredible features." Woody
LongacreTempe AZ,
USA"Amazing! I LOVE it!"

Colin GreenSydney, Australia"Great improvement of a superb product" Ed
JacksonWoking,
UK"Very impressive! I have been using the SBI site builder, which in itself is
an impressive tool. After seeing the new version of XsitePro though, I can honestly say that it is
second to none, in terms of functionality and features." Cesar
CamposSydney,
Australia"Absolutely amazing! I thought I'd seen the "BEST" website building software
in XSitePro v1 - version 2 just takes website building and developing to a whole new level. Sheer
brilliance!" Alan
HowellsStoke on Trent,
UK"EXCELLENT" DeannaWisconsin, USA"It looks awesome. The best just got better." SimonWiltshire, UK"WOW!!!" Judie
Brown
Washington, USA"I can hardly breathe! There is SO much stuff. I'm choking with
excitement!" Harold
Jaynes
Washington DC"WOW! FAR-OUT! GREAT! TREMENDOUS! This is coming from a web developer, not a
novice! I have so many clients that I have put on hold - waiting for the added features. These
features will save me so much time which will add revenue in my pockets...It's like going from the
horse and buggy to a Ferrari!" Betsy
ParsonsVirginia,
USA"Fantastic!" Andrea
Wilson
Vancouver, Canada"Wow...so many new, exciting and upgraded features this is going to make
website building a really fun project." Connie
UprightVirginia"I think it is a really powerful piece of software ... I am an experienced
marketer, as well as a web designer with FrontPage, DreamWeaver CS-3 and others. You guys have done
it again!" Ettione
StuckeyUSA"Superb improvement on an already excellent tool." James
MitchellUnited
Kingdom"Beyond all
expectations!"
Shush AryaUK"WOW! WOW! WOW! There seems to be everything that anyone will need to create
great content sites. And the easy tools to put video, ssn, rss feeds, and right now my mind is
swimming in awe."Steven R Shover Sr
Texas, USA

Paul Smithson - 2nd March
2009Many people are moving away from AdWords
due to a number of factors. The Google Slap has certainly
caused many people to flee due to massive increases in their
cost-per-click. Some advertisers have found it to be too much
work to increase their quality score enough to qualify for
cheaper clicks.

Another major reason for seeking an
alternative to AdWords is the amount of competition for each
keyword. When the number of competitors increases so much that
your CPC rises to such an extent that you can no longer make a
profit, it may be time to seek other
options.

One of the best alternatives to AdWords is
Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly known as Overture. It’s an
established and trustworthy network, and the quality of the
traffic is seen as being pretty good. Yahoo doesn’t have as
much traffic as Google, but the clicks are usually much
cheaper, which means you might get fewer click-throughs, but
you’ll make more profit on each one than you might do with
Google.

Another reliable network is the MSN
AdCenter. MSN is also seen as having relatively high
quality traffic, and their prices are also generally much
cheaper than AdWords. Again, the volume isn’t there, but
the prices usually make it worth
using.

There are also a number of smaller networks
providing an alternative to AdWords, but most of them tend to
have very low volumes of traffic and quality of the traffic
that they do have can be seriously questionable. Some of
these networks offer clicks for as low as a penny, but their
traffic is often so low and quality so dubious that you still
can’t make a profit even at such a low cost per
click.

GoClick is one major alternative that is
known for having very poor quality traffic. They can provide a
very large number of clicks at a very low price. Although they
may have very inexpensive clicks, the traffic has been known to
generate no sales in thousands and thousands of
clicks.

This may be because of the poor quality of
the sites in their network, or because they have poor tracking
in place to help discover and prevent fraudulent clicks, or due
to a number of other reasons, but many people have stated
openly that this network produces horrible conversion rates,
and the cheap clicks simply do not make up for their poor
conversions.

LookSmart is a fairly well-known search
marketing company. They provide relatively inexpensive
clicks, but they don’t have a lot of volume. They don’t
have extremely productive traffic, in general, but their
traffic is known for being much better quality than the traffic
from GoClick.

7Search is a popular alternative.
Their clicks are fairly cheap, and they have decent
volume. The quality of the traffic is said to be pretty
good, so it may be worth taking a look
at.

Finally, Bidvertiser is a popular search
marketing program. Their clicks are pretty inexpensive,
and they provide a pretty decent volume, but again the problem
seems to be that the traffic just doesn’t convert to
sales.

The important thing is to do your own
testing as what might not work for some people might work well
for you in your particular niche. It’s always worth testing
things, because until you do you have nothing but assumptions
to go on. Set aside a few dollars and give it a whirl. Who
knows, you might stumble across a winner. You don’t need to
spend thousands of dollars or even hundreds of dollars to get
an idea as to whether one of the alternative PPC providers is
working. Simply monitor the traffic that’s coming in and see
how well it is converting.

If you’ve had a 1000 visitors, but made
only one sale from that traffic you might decide it’s not worth
doing, particularly if you’re selling a low priced product.
However, if you’re selling something for $200 with a $100
profit on each sale a conversion rate of 1 in 1000 might be
fine, particularly if you were only paying one cent per click.
That would mean you’d be spending $10 for each order, and at
that kind of conversion rate and cost it would be a complete
no-brainer, wouldn’t it?

About Paul Smithson -
Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving
force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development
tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct
Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul
has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is
now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business
strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software
development, and maximizing the potential of on-line
businesses.

For more information about
this, and many other Internet Marketing-related
topics, visit Paul Smithson's site,
www.xsitepro.com.